Again you write as if Saddam was some kind of innocent. He was a ruthless tyrant with a desperate desire to obtain WMDs and certainly to give the appearance of having them. If our intelligence had been ten times better than it was, if we had had a mole in Saddam's inner circle, we still would have thought that he possessed them because his own generals thought so. Saddam paid 100s of billions in sanctions to keep his WMDs. He steadily lied, cheated and deceived the UN inspectors, as they found time and again. Who knew what he had? Who would have thought that he did it for a mere bluff, to cover up nothing? Who would have assumed so?
Nobody sane. What we know of his weapons we know only because we invaded. And we still don't know what was trucked to Syria. Moreover, because we invaded, we learned of very advanced nuclear programs in Libya and in Pakistan, that were being proliferated freely.
You keep saying that Saddam didn't turn out to have nukes, so he was "safe". This is the arguement of the left - Saddam was horrible, murderous and vile, if you can say that the US "had a hand in it". But the minute the US doesn't have a hand in it, Saddam becomes an innocent lamb, whose intentions all should trust. The sanctions should have been lifted (this was absolutely the argument of the left, in response to Saddam's dead babies parades), and Saddam left with his revenues to do what he pleased.
What we know now of Saddam's intentions, and AQ Khans' ready proliferation, would tell any sane person that once the sanctions had come off, it would not be too long before willing seller met eager buyer. If Saddam had managed to get nukes before 1990, he might be master of the Persian Gulf now, in control of 2/3rds of the world's oil. Maybe you would prefer this outcome. |
